Friday, September 3, 2010

Walking in the City

I took a walk around Audra's neighborhood yesterday while I was waiting to hear what the surgeon said. Taking walk in St. Louis and taking a walk on the farm are completely different experiences. On the farm you put on your shoes and start walking; there are no hills, no traffic, no trees to offer you shade and there are cross roads only at each mile. Notice how I made that sound as if I walked multiple miles? Clever huh?
You get to watch the hawks soar above you, the field mice scurry across the road, stink bugs creeping along with their bottoms up in the air (that is just weird), and you have to keep your eyes peeled for skunks and badgers who might be 'in possession' of the road at that moment. There is no argument about that, it is theirs if they are walking on it. We have a family of Badgers who sometimes decide to make their home under the cattle guard west of our driveway. I wish they wouldn't. I guess I read too many books as a child in which badgers were terribly mean. I realize they can be mean but are they inherently so? Probably not. I don't want to find out though so I leave them alone.
In St. Louis my walk was up hill or down hill, nothing in between. There was plenty of shade and the earthy smell of decaying leaves and acorns, which lay in every depression and crunched under foot. Here the squirrels dashed to and fro, up the trees and down and across the roof tops. Acorns fell on porches, driveways and beside me as I walked along, adding a wooden tip-tap sound to the crying of the jays and the rattling of locusts in the oaks. I love the smell of the green forest which shelters this city by the river.
I managed to get lost....again; not used to roads that turn every which a way and back and whose names become a different name for no apparent reason. I always manage to find my way home and it makes for a nice long walk on a cool, damp afternoon. I usually meet strangers to engage in conversation, a habit which seems to distress my children to no end. I like to visit with people; we are on the same team and need to get to know each other. That's my take on it. They see it differently and that's okay too. I learned this visiting habit from my mom and it has afforded me hours of good conversation, new knowledge and goods friends, if only for a moment in time.
I'm getting the high sign that we are about ready to go walk around in the Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite places to see when I am in town. Talk to you later.

1 comment:

i always noticed the differences when i stayed at my grandparents houses as a kid. i noticed at night when i would go to sleep there weren't crickets and coyotes and the breeze in the leaves, there were sirens and horns and cars driving by, people talking...kind of like city mouse and country mouse.

What I am trying to do here.

Stories of life lived on the mixed grass prairie in Northwest Oklahoma, the lessons gleaned from creation and news of family and friends. There may be poems, if you're lucky. Sometimes I can be a bit preachy, not always, but if I feel it necessary.